Wolski Stanisław

Wolski, Stanisław Janina Offner was born in Uwin, Ukraine, in 1925. She and her mother relocated to Lwów (today Lviv). There were just the two of them: Janina had no siblings or father. Janina’s mother worked for a German family. In 1941 the Germans entered the city, and the ghetto was established; all Jews were to move there, but initially it was open, and they could move about. In June 1942, an Aktion (mass execution) began. Janina and her mother tried hiding in a storage room in their house, but it was too small for both of them. To save her daughter, Janina’s mother went out and gave herself up to the Gestapo, so they would stop searching. With the help of the neighbors, who even helped her obtain false identification papers as “Janina Syganiec,” Janina spent some time hiding inside the house. When she first left the house, she ran into Stanisław Wolski (b. 1902), a man she knew from the technical college she had been attending. Despite having a university education in law, Stanisław attended the technical college and worked as a telephone cable technician. Having witnessed the persecution of intellectuals during the Soviet occupation, he had decided to put aside his law degree, and he chose a profession in which he would be a laborer. In this way he ended up in the same classroom as Janina. Stanisław knew that Janina was Jewish, and he decided to protect her. Soon after first meeting her in the street, he took her to his brother’s home, as his brother was a forest ranger who lived in an isolated place that was safer for the Jewish girl. They stayed there together until 1944, when Ukrainian violence in the area became too dangerous, and they were forced to move on to Dolina, where they were captured and sent to the Weidenbach labor camp in Germany. In September, Janina gave birth to a boy, whom they named Roman. In early 1945, the Soviet Army liberated Weidenbach. Janina, Stanisław, and baby Roman went back to Poland and moved in with Stanisław’s relatives. Eventually, they moved to Warsaw and married, and they lived there until the end of their lives (Stanisław passed away in 1986, and Janina in 1994). On March 15, 2016, Yad Vashem recognized Stanisław Wolski as Righteous Among the Nations.